Keith Houston

A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks

Revealing the secret history of punctuation, this delightful tour of 2,000 years of the written word, from ancient Greece to the Internet, explores the parallel histories of language and typography throughout the world and across time.

The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks

Shady Characters

Playful, approachable, and well-researched.

Ben Myers

John Eatmon

Lindsy Rice

Taylor

Keith Houston's entertaining book, inspired by his popular blog shadycharacters.co.uk, tells the unexpected stories of some unusual, and familiar, typographical marks and reveals a fascinating history of writing. Every character we write or type is a link to the past, and in today's printed, electronic and scrawled writing their history stares right back at us. This book charts the lives of some of the most intriguing examples, like how the pilcrow went from its noble origins in ancient Greece to near obsolescence, only to be revived again in word processing software. Each character reflects the bust and boom endured by punctuation with each new technological innovation and together they form a rich history of written communication. Keith Houston is the founder of ShadyCharacters.co.uk, where he writes about the unusual stories behind some well-known - and some rather more outlandish - marks of punctuation.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks

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